Plated Mail

[Eleatic Guest]

Was plated mail used by ancient peoples and does it hold any advantage over mail?

[Dan Howard]

You'd need to define what you mean by "plated mail".

[Flavivs Aetivs]

I think I've seen depictions of Lamellar over Mail Hauberks, but I don't know for certain if it was.

[M. Val. Naso]

IIRC earliest lamellar on mail depictions are from the 11-12th c.

[Dan Howard]

"Plated mail" is more commonly called "mail and plates" or "combined mail". Wikipedia calls it "plated mail", though I've not seen this term in many texts about armour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plated_mail

Some think that the Dura Europos grafitto is depicting this kind of armour but it is around 1500 years before it was invented. IMO it was developed in the 15th C to address all of the problems that lamellar had and seems to have replaced lamellar in regions where it was adopted. That's probably why mail and plates never saw use in Western Europe - they never had much use for lamellar.

[mcbishop]

"Plated mail" is more commonly called "mail and plates" or "combined mail". Wikipedia calls it "plated mail", though I've not seen this term in many texts about armour.

Perhaps an SCA term in origin? Certainly not in any of my books on armour. As ever, Wikipedia favours the recent and the trivial ;-)

The term 'plated mail' brings to mind some sort of plating process like tinning or galvanising and thus is both unhelpful and inaccurate. From the pictures, what is meant is something similar to what Martijn Wijnhoven termed 'lorica hamata squamataque', or Robinson's lorica plumata.

The chunk I have held in my sweaty hands (sweaty because they were in polyprop gloves), as yet unpublished, looked both time-consuming to make and fragile in use so I seriously doubt it had many major advantages over the normal forms of mail, scale, and plate. It would, however, have looked spectacular when given a good whack with a sword, with tiny fragments of scale going off in all directions ;-)

Naturally, the only true test would be to apply some serious abuse to a reconstructed fragment under scientific conditions at Shrivenham and I know a man who might be persuaded to do that.

Mike Bishop

[Dan Howard]

The medieval examples are a lot more substantial than the Roman "mail and scales". They definitely saw use in battle and the construction was pretty widespread - Russia, Asia, Middle East - pretty much everywhere that used to wear lamellar. Some examples have a very similar appearance to the Dura Graffito.

[Flavivs Aetivs]

The Byzantines began using it around the time of the Late Komnenian era, or early Palaiologian era.

[Dan Howard]

I'd love to see a cite for that. The earliest examples date to around the same time that the Byzantine Empire ceased to exist.

[Flavivs Aetivs]

That's more of an "as far as I know." I might be thinking of a form of Turkic armor, so you're probably correct in that the Byzzies did not use it.

[Eleatic Guest]

The medieval examples are a lot more substantial than the Roman "mail and scales". They definitely saw use in battle and the construction was pretty widespread - Russia, Asia, Middle East - pretty much everywhere that used to wear lamellar..

Weren't they superior to both mail and lamellar in that they combined the strengths of these two types? If so, what took it so long to develop plated mail?

[Dan Howard]

Weren't they superior to both mail and lamellar in that they combined the strengths of these two types?

It seems to be.

If so, what took it so long to develop plated mail?

No idea. There is no reason why they couldn't have made mail in the Bronze Age but they didn't. The simple explanation is that nobody thought of it.

[TDawson]

The earliest composite mail and plate harnessess I have looked at appear to have happened because someone strapped so-called "mirror armour' plates over mail and then realised that if one merged the plates into the mail the result would be just as much protection with less weight. This may first have happened before the end of the fourteenth century, but, as Dan said, does not really get established until the C15th.

I see no evidence or reason to conjecture any connect with lamellar at all.

[ValentinianVictrix]

What about Julian's description of Constantius II' Clibanarii? He was describing mail clad riders with breastplates and with mail clad horses at the same time Ammianus was writing about the same horsemen clad in tubular armour.

[Flavivs Aetivs]

The tubular shape would explain those cuirasses shown in the Notitia.